Conventional milk chocolate contains about 30-31% fat. It may contain more or less but rarely less than 27% fat. Calorie-conscious consumers demand a chocolate with lower calories and one way of reducing the calories in chocolate is by reducing the fat content. However, there are technical difficulties in reducing the fat content of milk chocolate causing the quality, taste and texture to be inferior to that of conventional milk chocolate. For example, reduced fat milk chocolates usually give a dry and coarse mouthfeel and the viscosity is too high for normal handling during preparation.
In U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/038,937, filed on Mar. 12, 1998 the entirety of which is hereby incorporated by reference, I have described a reduced fat milk chocolate which has the same or better physical characteristics such as texture, mouthfeel (lubrication), snap, viscosity, handling (tempering, mould, enrobing), and gloss than a conventional milk chocolate, e.g. containing 30-31% by weight fat.
The reduced fat chocolate described in the above co-pending Patent Application is obtained by preparing a powdered premix of substantially all the non-fat ingredients (non-fat dry milk, non-fat cocoa powder and sucrose), adding up to 96% of the fat containing ingredients (cocoa butter, milk fat, cocoa liquor and up to 60% of the total lecithin) to the powdered premix and mixing to give a mass containing from 18% to 24% by weight fat based on the total weight of the mass, refining the mass on refining rollers to give a particle size of from 25 to 35 microns, adding the remainder of the fat containing ingredients and lecithin, conching and tempering to give a reduced fat milk chocolate containing less than 27% by weight of fat.